I am a traditional PC gamer, and proud of what that means. We were the first, the crazy ones, visionaries who stared at pixels and saw space battles and dragons. We built our gaming house brick by brick, out of mailing lists, BBS posts, and LAN parties.
We were the nerds, and there were never enough of us to bother discriminating on small things like gender or race. We were one, and a rocket to the face was our love language.
We looked after our own, and when the suits tried to turn us into products, we made them eat their products. Ask Unity about their runtime fees. Ask Electronic Arts about the loot boxes.
Our fortress worked. And like in all fortresses, you could not see what was happening on the other side of the wall.
We scoffed at mobile gaming. Let the casuals have their candy crushers, we sneered, and turned back to our superior games. Today, mobile gaming makes roughly twice what PC gaming makes, and almost all of it is roulettes and energy timers. Live service wallet-squeezing.
Mind you, our instincts were right: free-to-play monetisation is a cancer. But we were also dead wrong, because the people on mobile were never the enemy. They were our friends and families, they were in their gaming infancy and we knew no better, and we let crushing market forces savage that innocence. Now they live in a wasteland with no permanence and no discovery, the perfect breeding ground for cynical companies.
It is a disaster, and we were the only ones who could have prevented it.
Twenty years and a few “this changes everything” hype cycles in, I can tell you what is about to happen with AI: we are about to turn our shoulders on catastrophe again.
The current discourse from the gaming community on AI is a tantrum. The gaming community is enraged. It is righteous, convinced in the holy fire it brings to bear on the cybernetic enemy. Sometimes, being visionaries backfires a little.
Awards are refused, hard-working studios are pilloried. Devs are mocked for admitting they used a model to clean up textures. Steam pages now carry a NO AI badge like a garlic wreath against vampires. It's an Inquisition.
The mood is also half right, which is the worst kind of right. AI training is being done unscrupulously, without attribution, with no regard for the work it consumes. Meta spends billions on compute and then has its engineers scour the internet for free books like teenagers without lunch money. They all do, from OpenAI to Anthropic. That is real, it is wrong, and it is worth fighting.
But the fight inside our fortress right now is not that fight. The entire community is raging against the letters A and I, indiscriminately..
AI is a tool, and it is not going back in the box. It is becoming the control layer for the next decade of software production, including game production, including yours. The studios that learn to direct it will outproduce the ones that refuse to touch it. That is not propaganda. That is what already happened with engines, with middleware, with version control, with every other tool the previous generation of nerds also swore they would never use.
The actual battle worth fighting has clear edges: training data attribution, compensation for ingested work, and labour protections for the artists. Those are concrete fights with concrete wins available, and they are exactly the fights the cultural reaction is drowning out.
We can refuse to engage with the technology and lose the leverage to shape it. We can engage, become the control layer, and use that position to insist on the parts of this that matter. There is no third door. There never is.
The strength behind fortress gaming comes from love. But love also makes you blind and insane when it's untempered by reality.
So calm down. Read a contract. Pick the right fight and stop slamming the door in the face of new generations. And maybe, just this once, we can get it right and welcome them instead.